I shall admit that when I heard about a Vivian Maier exhibition here in Milan I have been taken by a vivacious curiosity. The exhibition has been welcomed, by the media and by the people, with that rumble that she would have detested and it became an expected great success.
But the question is, who was Vivian Maier? Her story is not one of the happiest. She was born in New York in the year 1926 from French mother and Austrian father. She passed her life working as a nanny. She had a life without any excess but only a great curiosity, a constant thirst of culture and privacy. A culture that she kept with great care as she cared the huge photographic work she has done along the years.
Vivian Maier, holding her beloved Rolleiflex and other cameras, was never losing the chance to picture normal life moments down the streets of New York and Chicago. Passing in front of her photos means to dive in a touching everyday reality mainly pictured in black and white, normal persons, with a particular care for the weakest social classes.
She was used to spend her incomes in travels and films for her camera. She ended her life in poverty helped by three of the kids she raised. During the year 2007, due to a failing in the rent payment, her boxes full of negatives were sold in a local public auction doing the buyer’s fortune. The latter quickly understood the potential contained into the photos, more than 100’000, made by this enigmatic photographer.
Vivian Maier left this world in 2009 and the privacy, she hold during all her life behind that enigmatic look visible in her street self-portraits, was in the end dissolved.
* You can visit the exhibition in Via Meravigli 5 in Milan till January 31st.
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